Excess Death Trends (Australia, NZ, USA, UK, Canada, Sweden) 2020-2022

We take a look at the Excess Death trends over 2020-2022 for Australia, Sweden, United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand, using offical OECD data. https://stats.oecd.org/

Again, we’ll go to the official OECD Statistics website, OECD Stat, click on Health, then click on COVID-19 Health Indicators, Mortality (by week), and then Excess deaths by week. From this table, I’ll have to download data for each year one-by-one. I won’t bore you with the details, but basically I’ll be exporting each year of data and merging them together into the same spreadsheet.

Here’s the resulting spreadsheet. I won’t go over this as it’s just a wall of numbers, but it contains all the excess death data for most OECD countries for each week starting from 2020.

Here’s the total number of excess deaths for each country over the entire pandemic from least to greatest. Obviously, every country has a different population, so these numbers aren’t directly comparable. Iceland has the fewest deaths at 496 (but also has a very small population), Sweden has 6,584, Australia 33,729, while the United States has more than 1.6 million (noting that the US has a massive population).

This table is probably better as it shows the average excess deaths as a percentage change compared to historical averages. Sweden has done really well compared to other countries at 2.79%, noting that Sweden avoided lockdowns and never closed primary schools. The other Scandinavian countries, Norway and Denmark, did really well as well, at 4.07 and 5.9% respectively. New Zealand and Australia didn’t do too badly if you consider the entire period of the pandemic at 7.44 and 8.07% respectively, however, we know from the previous video, that 2022 has been a bad year for Australia in terms of excess deaths. We’ll investigate that shortly. The UK is in the middle of the pack at 10.43, Canada 12.08, while the United States fared fairly poorly at an average of 21.03%. Chile fared the worst with an average excess death percentage of 25%.

Here’s a graph of the percentage excess deaths for Australia over the entire pandemic, noting the first 52 weeks represent 2020, and so on. Earlier on in the pandemic, Australia was experiencing less deaths than normal, hence why the average percentage was fairly low in the previous table at around 8%. However, if we insert a trend line instead, we can see that the number of excess deaths has been trending upwards over the last two-and-a-half years. Only time will tell whether this trend continues.

Let’s put Sweden into the mix. We can see that earlier on in the pandemic, they had significantly more excess deaths than Australia, I can only assume because they didn’t lock down. However, when we insert a trend line, we can see a significant difference. Clearly Swedish excess deaths are on the way down (at least, with the current data), whereas Australian excess deaths are trending upwards. Of course, this may change when new data is released.

Just for interest, here’s the United States with its trend line. It’s had significant excess deaths throughout the pandemic (according to the OECD figures) and is ever so slightly trending downwards.

Here’s the UK data. It had significant excess deaths early on in the pandemic, but is also now trending downwards.

Canada also experienced significant excess deaths early on in the pandemic, and like Australia, its excess deaths are trending upwards according to this data. Although we can also see that the most recent data, like Australia, seems to be heading downwards, but we’ll need more data to know for sure.

And just one more, New Zealand. Sorry, I often forget to include our friends from across the Tasman. New Zealand are tracking pretty much exactly like Australia. That’s weird, isn’t it? I mean, we’re on two completely separate islands. I presume our policies were very similar.

Anyway, that brings us to an end to this presentation. Although Sweden had a lot of extra deaths early on in the pandemic, over time they have been doing really well, and now have one of the lowest excess death rates in the world.

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